If your paid ads aren’t getting the results you want, you might as well set your money on fire.

That might sound harsh, but it’s true. Continuing to pay for clicks that aren’t going anywhere – or spending time creating ads that nobody’s clicking on – is a waste of time and money.​Your audience is waiting – but they’ll find someone else if they can’t find you.Not sure how to turn those paid ads into the lead generators you want them to be?

Never fear, we’re here to help. We’re about tell you how to revamp your strategy and start turning clicks into profits.Strategy? What’s That?Are you mistaking tactics for strategy? A lot of people do – so let’s start by defining strategy. A strategy is the road you take to achieve a goal. It’s not specific. It’s broad and always has its eyes on the prize.

For example, if you want to increase your sales by 50% with PPC advertising, that’s a strategy. Choosing new keywords to target? That’s a tactic – one step of many that you use to achieve your goal.

You must know what you want to accomplish with your PPC campaigns before you get started… because knowing helps you map out the road ahead of you.

Moving the Goalposts

Before you get excited and start reworking your ads, take a step back. You may have defined a goal – but is it achievable?

Increasing your sales by a certain percent – or generating a chosen number of leads – might be very achievable. Or it might not. If your current campaign is generating ten leads a week, you might not be able to get to a thousand a week in one campaign.Be realistic. Evaluate your current position and pick a goal that you can reach. It might be a challenge, but it must be within the realm of possibility to be useful.

Find the GapsYou’re already running PPC ads… that aren’t working… but do you know why they aren’t? That’s the next step – and proceeding beyond this point without identifying those gaps is a mistake.

Whatever they are, those gaps exist. You can’t revamp your strategy if you don’t acknowledge them.

For many companies and entrepreneurs, that means going back to the drawing board:

Re-doing (or doing for the first time) keyword research

Identifying competitors (and the keywords they use)

Evaluating the wording and images in your ads

Looking at the rest of your sales funnel and testing it for weaknesses

Reworking your retargeting strategy

That’s a lot – but it’s going to be time well spent. You can’t hope to get better results from your PPC campaigns if you’re not willing to get a little dirty in the process.Now, let’s look at three things you can do to ramp up the clicks you get from your campaigns – and the profits your business earns.

Tip #1: Double Up on Your KeywordsThis first tip is one you can you use if you already have a high SERP placement, and it can help you to dominate the search results if you do it properly.Let’s say you have a page – or a piece of content – that’s already ranked near the top on Google. That’s great – but you can double down and grab even more PPC traffic for yourself. Here’s how.

Make note of the pages or content with the highest SERP rankings – and the keywords they’re ranking for

Create compelling PPC ads that use the same keywords

Now, your page will appear near the top of the SERP – as it always did. However, you’ll also have the advantage of having your ad appear at the top of the page too.That’s a one-two punch that can make your company and content stand out and give you a distinct advantage over your competitors.

That number’s no joke – and attention must be paid.Gmail ads are affordable and quick to set up – and there are a couple of great ways you can target your competitors’ customers. For example:

You can target keywords used in emails – and that means you can focus on keywords used by your competitors. Google is ending the practice of mining emails for keywords at the end of the year, but for the next few months you can take advantage of their current targeting methods.

Another tactic to try is adding your competitors’ URLs to your targeted keywords. This is a sneaky way to reach their customers. However, you do need to keep in mind that Gmail will treat the URL you add as a keyword.

Gmail ads allow you to reach a huge audience in return for a relatively low expenditure – and that will ensure that every click counts.

Tip #3: Retarget, Retarget, and Retarget AgainYou’ve probably heard the old saying that a customer must be “touched” by a brand between 7 and 10 times before they’ll bite and make a purchase.It would be easy if you could count on customers to visit and revisit your website until they reached their comfort level – but that’s not the way it works.The answer is artful retargeting. By artful, we mean that you need to think about which actions you’re going to retarget and how you’re going to retarget those customers.Here are some examples:

If people bounce away from your landing page, you might retarget them with an ad with a fresh message and a different value proposition.

People who begin to fill out your opt-in form but don’t finish might respond to an ad reminding them of the benefits of signing up with you.

For those who have opted all the way in but not made a purchase, targeting with a coupon or discount can help close the deal.

Note that all these options use a similar tactic by offering customers something that’s the same, but different.​In other words, your ads shouldn’t reuse the same copy that’s on your website. Users have already seen that and it didn’t work, so make sure your retargeting ads offer them something new to think about.

Making Every Click Count…PPC ads aren’t doing you any good if nobody’s clicking. If you’re going to pay for a click, you want it to mean something – and these ideas can help you get the targeted, pre-qualified traffic you need to succeed.